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Lyft Inc. filed its initial S-1 registration statement with the SEC on March 1, 2019. It previously filed a confidential statement on December 6, 2018. While the IPO has not yet been priced, the Wall Street Journal has reported that the company expects to be priced in the $20 to $25 billion range. The road show is expected to start during the week of March 18 and the IPO may occur before the end of March.

Uber filed a confidential registration statement on December 7, 2018. Its valuation has been pegged in the $120 billion range. The Uber IPO will probably be the largest - and the most controversial - IPO in the U.S. during 2019.

Uber and Lyft are the two largest ridesharing companies in the U.S., a market that Lyft describes as a "peer-to-peer marketplace for on-demand ridesharing." Uber, the poster child for the so-called "sharing economy," operates in about 70 countries and also has businesses in freight hauling, autonomous driving, food delivery, air taxis and artificial intelligence research. In contrast, Lyft is only available in the United States and Canada and has stayed tightly focused on its core ridesharing business. Both companies have focused on growth at the expense of profitability.

Lyft has benefited from a spate of scandals that rocked Uber in 2017, including allegations of sexual harassment made by its female employees, the resignation of its chief executive officer and its use of illicit software to deceive regulators. As a result, Lyft had a 39% share of the U.S. ridesharing market in 2018, up 17% in two years.

Among the biggest risks involved in the push to driverless cars is getting beaten in the race. The first companies to offer autonomous ride sharing “are expected to have long-term advantages compared with traditional non-autonomous ride sharing offerings,” Lyft says.